The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed suit against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) regarding a case in a Muskegon, Mich. hospital. According to the ACLU, Tamesha Means was 18 weeks pregnant in December, 2010, when her water broke. A friend brought her to Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon. Ms. Means subsequently made two more trips to this hospital, and her baby, born prematurely, died. According to a New York Times piece, …Dr. Douglas W. Laube,...

Over the course of 2013 we’ve enabled new methods of giving including Dwolla and PayPal. Additionally, recurring monthly donations are now possible via PayPal and credit card. This week we’re introducing the ability to donate with Bitcoin, the popular digital currency. Learn more about Bitcoin at or by reading Joe Carter’s posts (part 1, part 2, and part 3) here at the PowerBlog. The option of donating anonymously with Bitcoin is also possible. Click here to donate to Acton with...

Last night on CNBC’s The Kudlow Report,PovertyCuredirector and Acton Research Fellow Michael Matheson Miller joined host Lawrence Kudlow and Rusty Reno, Editor of First Things magazine, to discuss the position of the Roman Catholic Church on global capitalism in light of Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation ‘Evangelii Gaudium.’ The video is embedded below. ...

Today at First Things’ On the Square feature, I question the tone and timing of Patriarch Batholomew’s recent message on climate change. While I do not object to him making a statement about the subject in conjunction with the opening of the Warsaw Climate Change Conference, his initial reference, then silence, with regards to Typhoon Haiyan while other religious leaders offered their prayer, sympathy, and support to those affected, is disappointing. I write, While other religious leaders offered prayer and...

When es to pondering the plight of millennials, the need for critique runs as deep as the challenges. Yet the obstacles have at least something to do with our present reality and the forces that set it in motion. Long before we millennials were pursuing silly degrees and dreaming up fantastical futures en masse, someone somewhere began by whispering, “yes.” In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, P.J. O’Rourke takes aim at one set of such predecessors, the Boomers. Speaking as a...

Until 2012, no federal law or regulation required employers to cover contraception or abortifacients in pany health plans. But last month a New York Times Times editorial claimed that “the assertion by private businesses and their owners of an unprecedented right to impose the owners’ religious views on workers who do not share them.” What changed over the course of a year that now makes it a “war on contraceptives” to oppose adding such coverage? As Ramesh Ponnuru explains, it’s...

I find the new investigative essay by journalist Michael J. Totten about Havana before and munism poignant and beautiful, a must-read for anyone interested in munism and the universal hunger for liberty. The long essay is worth every word, but I’ve excerpted a few of the most arresting passages here: The rotting surfaces of some of the buildings [in the tourist district] have been restored, but those changes are strictly cosmetic. Look around. There’s still nothing to buy. You’ll find...

Acton Institute Director of Research Samuel Gregg has been busy on the interview circuit over the past few days as news organizations look for intelligent analysis of Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation that that was released last week. On Monday, the Wall Street Journal called upon Gregg to provide his thoughts on the economic content in the exhortation on Opinion Journal Live; we’ve embedded the video below. ...

Madison Root is an enterprising young lady. She knows braces are expensive, and wants to help pay for them. So, she went to her uncle’s farm, cut and bundled mistletoe and headed to the downtown Portland, Ore. market to sell it for the holiday season. And then she ran into the long arm of bureaucracy. …a security guard told her that she had to stop selling due to a city ordinance that bans such activity in a park “except as...

In a stunning new video, Matt Bieler strings together beautiful images and a few simple words to celebrate the work of three stay-at-home moms from three different regions of the country. The tasks shown, like those of any mother, are numerous and varied, and those explicitly mentioned follow accordingly: breakfast-maker, sibling caretaker, teacher, cleaner, doctor, angel. “She’s with me all the time,” one child whispers. In our celebration of work — the dignity it brings, the service it provides, the...